EightMill is a comprehensive film shoot management system for both experienced and novice film producers. Import your script and associate characters with actors. Scout for locations with a built-in map view. Organise and plan your scenes, locations, crew, generate call sheets, catering and more. Whether you’re shooting on a shoestring budget or the latest Hollywood blockbuster, EightMill has the tools you need to deliver an award-winning film on time, every time.
Name: Matthew Young
Student number: 46972495
The EightMill minimum viable product (MVP) should include the following:
The highly sensitive nature of large blockbuster films means that security is a key tenet of EightMill’s design. EightMill would employ industry-standard security practices including secure password hashing, multi-factor authentication, and customisable access control levels (ACLs) for different users.
Films typically have very tight shooting schedules, so it’s highly important that EightMill operates smoothly throughout production. EightMill would employ industry-standard high-availability software engineering techniques, including regular backups, data redundancy, and simulated catastrophe scenarios.
EightMill is designed to meet producers where they are, and with whatever system they are currently using, to make their lives easier. Hence, it should be capable of importing screenplays from a wide variety of formats, and exporting call sheets and other information to a wide variety of formats. There should be no vendor lock-in.
As a web platform, EightMill could potentially have hundreds, if not thousands, of active users online simultaneously. This is especially so given the huge number of crew involved in Hollywood blockbusters. EightMill needs to be able to handle all these connections simultaneously without breaking a sweat. Likewise, when less users are active, EightMill needs to be able to scale down to reduce overhead costs.
EightMill’s security will be validated through industry-standard, comprehensive security testing procedures including:
EightMill’s reliability will be validated through simulated disaster scenarios, such as killing an AWS service to simulate a regional power outage, and ensuring the service gracefully recovers. We would also simulate data loss situations by removing files and tables from a staging database. We may also elect to employ the principle of Chaos Engineering, and continuously simulate failure scenarios in production environments to ensure high reliability.
EightMill’s interoperability will be validated by verifying that a variety of screenplays in a number of the file formats listed in the Scope section can be imported successfully. This includes sample screenplays with an aggressively large number of characters or locations. EightMill’s interoperability will also be validated by verifying that the files it exports, such as PDF call sheets, conform to film industry standards.
The scalability of the EightMill platform will be validated through industry-standard load-testing techniques, such as Grafana k6. The status of the backend will be verified throughout the load test to ensure that it remains responsive and scales up as intended. Likewise, once the load is reduced, it will be verified that EightMill scales down as expected to reduce cost overhead.